Sunday, May 03, 2015

Dropbox notifying Australian users their services will now be provided from Ireland.

I received an email from Dropbox today. I don't use Dropbox, but have set it up for testing purposes in case clients use Dropbox. Here's a copy of the email.


When I first read this I thought perhaps Dropbox may be moving services out of America and into an area such as a the European community, where the United States don't have as easy access to the data. The European community sometimes appears to have better privacy regulations in place.

However if you read this from the Dropbox site you can only feel this move is more to reduce taxes than for other reasons.

Tax minimisation for business is a legitimate strategy. Good business requires keeping costs contained and reducing costs improves the bottom line. However we all have an obligation to pay taxes. Eventually governments will find a way to remove this very cost effective method by which companies transfer tax obligations from one country to another. Some companies prefer to move the taxes back to their own countries and pay tax there rather than the country where the income is earned and that's been going on for years.

Really if a service is purchased in a country, is delivered in the country and resourced from the country, it makes sense the tax that would normally occur should occur. In the end if it doesn't, the only one at fault is the government for having rules in place which enables the tax minimisation to occur.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au
Helping local business.


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